"This is being treated as a big book. You want to get it right or you'll be fired."

--Simon & Schuster publisher David Rosenthal, as quoted in the Journal story, which characterizes this as a "quip."

"I'll probably end up returning 10 of them. Most people have no idea who Sumner Redstone is."

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--Douglas Dutton, owner of the independent bookstore Dutton's Brentwood Books in Los Angeles, as quoted in the Journal story, which does not characterize this as a "quip."

(Thanks to Matthew Benjamin.)

Got a whopper? Send it tochatterbox@slate.com. To be considered, an entry must be an unambiguously false statement paired with an unambiguous refutation, and both must be derived from some appropriately reliable public source. Preference will be given to newspapers and other documents that Chatterbox can link to online.

Close readers of this column will note that we've eased up on the rules to accommodate whoppers that aren't necessarily lies. Chatterbox still gives preference to outright fibs (such as today's entry), but these are harder to confirm than Chatterbox previously imagined. Non-lie entries must still quote people who, it can be reasonably assumed, ought to know better.